He was easy to get…

January 11, 2016April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

He was easy to get.
It was possible on the second evening.
I waited till the third (and knew
I was taking a risk).
Then he said, laughing: it’s the bath salts
Not your hair.
But he was easy to get.For a month I left him straight aftermaking love.
Every third day I stayed away.
I never wrote.
But store up snow in a pot
It gets dirty all the same.
I did more than I could
When it was already over. I threw out the bitches who weresleeping with him

As though I didn’t mind
I did it laughing and crying.
I turned on the gas
Five minutes before he arrived, I
Borrowed money in his name:
It did no good.

But one night I slept
And one morning I got up
I washed myself from head to toe
Ate and said to myself:
That’s it now.

Truth is:
I slept with him twice more
But by God and my mother
It was nothing.
Like everything else
It passed.

by Bertolt Brecht; translated by David Constantine

‘He was easy to get …’, which was originally published in German in 1960 as ‘Es war leicht ihn zu bekommen…’, is translated by David Constantine. Copyright © 1960 by Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag, from Love Poems by Bertolt Brecht, translated by David Constantine and Tom Kuhn, and published by Liveright Publishing Corporation (2015). It is used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

This poem is the penultimate one in our series featuring work from collections shortlisted for The Poetry Society’s Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize 2015, judged by Olivia McCannon and Clare Pollard, and supported in 2015 by the British Council. The winner of the competition was Iain Galbraith, who translated Jan Wagner’s book Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc Publications, 2015). You can find out more about the competition and all the shortlisted books on the Poetry Society website.

David Constantine is a freelance writer and translator. His most recent volume of poetry is Elder (2014); his fourth collection of short stories, Tea at the Midland, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2013. You can read more about his work on the Poetry Archive website.

Bertolt Brecht is widely considered the greatest German playwright of the twentieth century, and to this day remains best known as a dramatist, the author of Mother Courage, The Threepenny Opera, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, among so many other works. However, Brecht was also a hugely prolific and eclectic poet, producing more than 2,000 poems during his lifetime—indeed, so many that even his own wife, Helene Weigel, had no idea just how many he had written. Written between 1918 and 1955, these poems reflect an artist driven not only by the bitter and violent politics of his age but, like Goethe, by the untrammeled forces of love, romance, and erotic desire. Read more about the book on the Norton website.

Liveright Publishing Corporation is an imprint of W.W. Norton, that is a home for outstanding works that define and redefine our culture, and that continue to provoke interest and inspire readers around the world. Find out more about Liveright here.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

01 43 15 50 67

December 21, 2015April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

for Fabienne

By the time we finished talking it has snowed
We’d laughed and sighed like a pair of sisters
Can you see this caribou from your window it’s a cloud
A moose an ermine little moving fox
It changes every moment changes to sky-blue-sky
If the night has stars in it it’s a promise of blue
Have you checked out the chimney-stacks the great she-bears
We ought to see oceans more
We shouldn’t need a second glance to make out a giraffe
All white white white white where you are as well?
A squid a cuttlefish an octopus might add a splash of ink
All white white white without red rabbit eyes
We mustn’t make each other late time’s getting on I’d better go
There are some in dotty frocks and some in geometric shapes
And oh I almost forgot
Old things float up and new ones too
A slotted spoon a convalescence or a precious stone
Jewel of sleeping water there was a cat called that
It was
Drowned jewel
Clouds don’t miaow though jewellery can trickle down
When we stopped our oneversation we came down as snow

by Valérie Rouzeau; translated by Susan Wicks

This is the final Weekly Poem of 2015. The poems will return to your inbox on 11 January. A very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all our readers!

This poem continues our series featuring work from collections shortlisted for The Poetry Society’s Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize 2015, judged by Olivia McCannon and Clare Pollard, and supported in 2015 by the British Council. The winner of the competition was Iain Galbraith, who translated Jan Wagner’s book Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc Publications, 2015). You can find out more about the competition and all the shortlisted books on the Poetry Society website.

Susan Wicks, poet and novelist, was born in Kent, and has lived and worked in France, Ireland and America. She is the author of six collections of poetry including House of Tongues (2011), Singing Underwater (1992), which won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize, and The Clever Daughter (1996), which was shortlisted for both the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. She was one of the Poetry Society’s ‘New Generation Poets’ in 1994. Cold Spring in Winter (2010), her translation of Valérie Rouzeau’s first major collection, Pas revoir, was shortlisted both for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for Literary Translation and the International Griffin Prize for Poetry, and won that year’s Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation from French. Her translation of Valérie Rouzeau’s second collection in English, Talking Vrouz, won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for Literary Translation in 2014. You can read a discussion with Susan and Valérie on the Arc website, and hear the pair read one of Valérie’s poems and its translation together.

Valérie Rouzeau was born in 1967 in Burgundy, France and now lives in a small town near Paris, Saint-Ouen, well-known for its flea-market. She has published a dozen collections of poems, including Pasrevoir (l’Idée Bleue, 1999), Va où (Le Temps qu’il Fait, 2002) and more recently Apothicaria (Wigwam, 2007) and Mange-Matin (l’Idée Bleue, 2008). She has also published volumes translated from Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams, Ted Hughes and the photographer Duane Michals. She is the editor of a little review of poetry for children (from 5 to 117 years old) called dans la lune and lives mainly by her pen through public readings, poetry workshops in schools, radio broadcasts and translation. Valérie was selected to represent France in the 2012 Cultural Olympiad Poetry Parnassus in London.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc Publications has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. As well as its page on Facebook, you can find Arc on Twitter. Visit Arc’s website to join the publisher’s mailing list, and to find full details of all publications and writers. Arc offers a 10% discount on all books purchased from the website (except Collectors’ Corner titles). Postage and packing is free within the UK.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Lesson

December 14, 2015April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

It was a shadowy yard, walled high with stones.
The trees held early apples, dark
wine-coloured skin, the perfected flavour of things
ripe before their time.
Clay jugs sat alongside the wall.
I ate apples and sipped the purest water,
knowing the outside world had stopped dead from heat.
Then my father appeared and tweaked my nose,
and he wasn’t sick and hadn’t died, either;
that’s why he was laughing, blood
stirring in his face again,
he was hunting for ways to spend this happiness:
where’s my chisel, my fishing pole,
what happened to my snuffbox, my coffee cup?
I always dream something’s taking shape,
nothing is ever dead.
What seems to have died fertilises.
What seems motionless waits.

by Adélia Prado; translated by Ellen Doré Watson

The Poetry Centre recently announced the winners of its inaugural International Poetry Competition, which received nearly 900 entries from all over the world. In the Open category, the winner was Siobhan Campbell, with second place going to Claire Askew. There was a Special Commendation for Wes Lee. In the ESL category, the winner was Marie-Aline Roemer, with Armel Dagorn in second place, and a Special Commendation for Hanne Busck-Nielsen. You can read the winning poems and see the shortlist and longlist on the Centre’s website.

Poet & translator Ellen Doré Watson directs the Poetry Center at Smith College and has translated over a dozen books from the Brazilian Portuguese, most notably poetry by Brazilian Adélia Prado, including The Mystical Rose (Bloodaxe, 2014). She has also translated from the Arabic with co-translator Saadi Simawi. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, Watson serves on the faculty of the Drew University Graduate Program in Poetry and Translation and as Poetry & Translation editor of The Massachusetts Review. She was shortlisted for The Poetry Society’s Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize in 2015 for her translation of The Mystical Rose by Adélia Prado (Bloodaxe Books). Read more about the book here.

Adélia Luzia Prado de Freitas (Adélia Prado) was born in 1935 and has lived all her life in the provincial, industrial city of Divinópolis, in Minas Gerais (General Mines), the Brazilian state that has produced more presidents and poets than any other in the country. She was the only one in her family of labourers to see the ocean, to go to college, or to dream of writing a book. She attended the University of Divinópolis, earning degrees in Philosophy and Religious Education, and taught in schools until 1979. Adélia Prado has been the subject of dozens of theses and dissertations, as well as a documentary film and countless articles, profiles, and interviews in newspapers, literary supplements, and popular magazines, and her work has been translated into Spanish, Italian and English. In June 2014 Prado received the Griffin Lifetime Achievement Award in Canada. You can find out more about Prado on the Bloodaxe website.

Bloodaxe Books is internationally renowned for quality in literature and excellence in book design, and its authors and books have won virtually every major literary award given to poetry, from the T.S. Eliot Prize and Pulitzer to the Nobel Prize. You can read more about Bloodaxe on the publisher’s website.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

‘the is of the silence in the room’

December 7, 2015April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

the is of the silence in the room
the is of the walls, each so different
the is of the sunshine on the curtain
the greying is of the dust
through the thin is of the glass
the is of the sparrow outside the window
the is of the child on the grass, chasing a butterfly
the is of the butterfly in the net
the floating is of the cloud

and once again: I am

in this vast
circular spherical nobody’s
agape virulent scorching
grass-strong swift-winged quick-legged
dripping rabid
acute
is

by Krystyna Miłobędzka; translated by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese

‘the is of the silence in the room’ is copyright © Krystyna Miłobędzka; translated by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese, 2013. It is reprinted from Nothing More by Krystyna Miłobędzka, published by Arc Publications (2013).

Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese writes between English, Polish and Danish; her multilingual texts have appeared in such journals as Shearsman, Cordite Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, on the London Underground and in anthologies. She has published numerous translated collections including Nothing More (Arc, 2013), her selection from Krystyna Miłobędzka, and Salt Monody (Zephyr Press, 2006) by Marzanna Kielar. She has co-edited Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird: Poetry from Poland (Zephyr Press, 2004), guest-edited Polish issues of Poetry Wales and Modern Poetry in Translation, and is a contributing editor at Poetry Wales, where she regularly reviews translated books. She teaches poetry-in-translation courses for the Poetry School in London and works at the Centre for Internationalisation and Parallel Language Use, University of Copenhagen. Arc’s website features three essays by Wójcik-Leese about her translations of Miłobędzka’s poetry.

Krystyna Miłobędzka was born in Margonin, Poland, in 1932. She is an author of twelve books of poetry, including a collected poems, Zbierane1960-2005 (Gathered 1960-2005), which appeared in 2006, and zbierane, gubione (gathered, lost) in 2010. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, was nominated for the NIKE Prize in 2006, and won the Silesius Award in 2009, and again in 2013 for Lifetime Achievement. She lives in Puszczykowo near Poznań. You can find out more about Nothing More on the Arc website.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Black Beans

November 30, 2015April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

In the afternoon I pick up a book
In the afternoon I put a book down
In the afternoon it enters my head there is war
In the afternoon I forget each and every war

In the afternoon I grind coffee
In the afternoon I put the ground coffee
Back together again gorgeous
Black beans
In the afternoon I take off my clothes put them on
Apply make-up first then wash
Sing don’t say a thing

by Sarah Kirsch; translated by Anne Stokes

Anne Stokes holds a PhD in German Literature from Ohio State University. She teaches Translation at the University of Stirling and translates from German.

Sarah Kirsch (1935–2013) is recognised as one of Germany’s most powerful poets of the post-war era. She lived and worked first in East Germany, then (after political persecution) in the West, making her home finally in rural Schleswig-Holstein. Her poetry’s free-flowing syntax and fluid sound patterning reflect her lifelong resistance to constraint and convention. Anne Stokes’ translations above all capture the living sounds and rhythms of Kirsch’s writing. In Ice Roses Anglophone readers experience the full range of Kirsch’s poetry, from her early work to her last books, full of the strange beauty of her chosen landscapes. You can read more about the book on the Carcanet website.

Carcanet Press is in its fifth decade, and continues to publish a comprehensive and diverse list of modern and classic poetry in English and in translation, as well as a range of inventive fiction, Lives and Letters and literary criticism. Read more about the publisher on its website.

an essay on midges

November 23, 2015April 20, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

as if all the letters had suddenly
floated free of a paper
and formed a swarm in the air;

they form a swarm in the air,
of all that bad news telling us
nothing, those skimpy muses, wispy

pegasuses, only abuzz with the hum
of themselves, made from the last twist
of smoke as the candle is snuffed,

so light you can hardly say: they are –
looking more like shadows, umbrae
jettisoned by another world

to enter our own, they dance, their legs
finer than anything pencil can draw,
with their miniscule sphinx-like bodies;

the rosetta stone, without the stone.

by Jan Wagner, translated by Iain Galbraith

There are two exciting Poetry Centre events this week: on Wednesday we host a spoken word/open mic evening, with a featured performances by Maddie Godfrey (Finalist in the Australian National Poetry Slam, 2015), andlive music by Steph Masucci. You can find more details on our Facebook page.

Then on Thursday we launch our occasional lunchtime poetry reading, Eat My Words, with Emma Jones and Harry Man. All are very welcome. The reading will be from 12.15-1pm in T.300 (Tonge Conservatory), Gipsy Lane, Oxford Brookes. Contact us for more details.

Over the next few weeks, we will be featuring poems from collections shortlisted for The Poetry Society’s Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize 2015, judged by Olivia McCannon and Clare Pollard, and supported in 2015 by the British Council. We begin with the winner of the competition, which was announced this evening. You can find out more about the competition and all the shortlisted books on the Poetry Society website.

Iain Galbraith‘s poems have appeared in Poetry Review, PN Review, Edinburgh Review, Times Literary Supplement, Irish Pages, New Writing and many other journals and books. He is the editor of five poetry anthologies and translates poetry, fiction and drama. A winner of the John Dryden Translation Prize and the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry Translation, his recent translated books include W.G. Sebald’s poetry and John Burnside’s selected poems in German. He is an occasional lecturer, and in 2014-15 taught Poetics of Translation at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He was born and grew up in the west of Scotland and now lives in Wiesbaden, Germany.

Of the winning collection, the judges said: ‘Galbraith converts every challenge (formal, lexical, metrical) into an opportunity, matching Wagner’s ingenuity and investment at every step, having internalized the “primal syntax” so completely that everything he writes hits the mark. The result is a perfect sufficiency: a set of poems in English that somehow inhabit the same skin as the German, with their own autonomous heart and lungs.’

Jan Wagner studied English in Hamburg, Dublin and Berlin, where he has lived since 1995. A poet, essayist and translator of British and American poetry by Charles Simic, Simon Armitage, Matthew Sweeney, and Robin Robertson, he was also, until 2003, co-publisher of The Outside of the Element, a boxed loose-leaf periodical based on an idea by Marcel Duchamp. He has published six volumes of poetry and has received numerous awards, including the Mondsee Poetry Award (2004), the Ernst Meister Prize for Poetry (2005), the Wilhelm Lehmann Prize (2009) and the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize (2011).

In the Orchard of Pomegranates

November 16, 2015April 20, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Then you wonder, astonished, who am I? I am a mustard seed in the middle of the sphere of the moon.
Moses Cordovero, Or Ne’erav (The Sweet Light), trans. Ira Robinson

When I was a girl, holy in sending,
alive in receiving, I knew a word
was, like an angel, flaming, both message
and messenger.

Electric the flowerin my eye, the opening of the heart:
if ‘house’ is a prison, ‘home’ is a latticed
(look up) constellation. At such elevation,
this is return under you the harvest moon.

Anemone,
anemometer.

I have nothing withheld in my hands, but
nothing. Doubled. The seed of. Your wish for.

by Sophie Mayer

Two notes from the Centre: on Friday 20 November there will be a free poetry workshop in Oxford on the theme of ‘history’, led by experienced poets. From myths, collective stories or personal narratives, what does history mean to you? To join, email your name and affiliation to oxfordpoetry.history@gmail.com The workshop will take place from 3-5pm  in the Old Library, University Church of St Mary the Virgin, High St, Oxford, OX1 4BJ.

And on Wednesday 25 November, the Centre is hosting a spoken word/open mic event in the Main Lecture Theatre, Clerici Bldg, Gipsy Lane on the Headington campus. All are welcome to this event, which will feature numerous local poets and a set from Maddie Godfrey (Australian National Poetry Slam Finalist, 2015). You can find more details and register your interest via the Facebook page. ‘In the Orchard of Pomegranates’ is copyright © Sophie Mayer, 2015. It is reprinted from (O) (Arc Publications, 2015) by permission of Arc Publications.

Notes from Arc Publications:

Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Her poetry has been translated into Russian, Greek, Dutch, and Japanese, and has appeared on poster hoardings in Dublin and as part of Yoko Ono’s Meltdown 2013. Previous collections include Her Various Scalpels (Shearsman, 2009), The Private Parts of Girls (Salt, 2011), Kiss Off (Oystercatcher, 2011) and signs of the sistership (with Sarah Crewe, KFS, 2013). She is a film critic and scholar, author of The Cinema of Sally Potter, and (for the Oxford Handbook on Contemporary British and Irish Poetry), ‘Cinema Mon Amour’, the definitive essay on British poetry and film.

(O) is Sophie Mayer’s fourth published poetry collection. Energetic, determined, politicised, contemporary and classical. Brimming with wit, these poems endeavour into the challenges, obstacles and successes which accompany the path into womanhood. A powerful poetic voice, which serves as a testament to the women who live in the cracks of history. You can read more about the book on the Arc website, and more about the author on her own site. You can also follow her on Twitter.

Sudden Collapses in Public Places

November 9, 2015April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

like buildings, people can disintegrate
collapse in queues, or in a crowded street

causing mayhem, giving kids bad dreams
of awkward corpses, policemen, drops of blood

but I’m stood here, a miracle of bones
architecturally balanced in my boots

I feel each joint, each hinge and spinal link
jolting to the rhythm of my breath

aware of every tremor in my joists,
and yet I’m scared I haven’t done enough

to be re-enforced and girded, Christ, I fear
those flowers tied to lamp posts, dread the crash

by Julia Darling

Two upcoming events: on Monday 16 November at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop from 7.30pm, the Poetry Centre co-hosts a reading by visiting US poet celeste doaks and Hanne Busck-Nielsen. It promises to be a lively and exciting event. Find out more on our Facebook page.

And then on Friday 20 November there will be a free poetry workshop in Oxford on the theme of ‘history’, led by experienced poets. From myths, collective stories or personal narratives, what does history mean to you? Does living in Oxford, a place steeped  in history and memories, inspire you to write about the past? To join, email your name and affiliation to oxfordpoetry.history@gmail.com The workshop will take place from 3-5pm  in the Old Library, University Church of St Mary the Virgin, High St, Oxford OX1 4BJ.

Notes from Arc Publications:

Julia Darling was born in Winchester in 1956, and moved to Newcastle in 1980. Her first full poetry collection, Sudden Collapses in Public Places, was published by Arc in 2003. It was awarded a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Julia’s second collection Apology for Absence was published in 2005. Darling was a recipient of the prestigious Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award, the largest literary award in England.

Ten years after Julia Darling’s death, her poetry continues to represent the very essence of what a poem can be – in her own words, a ‘first aid kit for the mind’. Surprising, vivid, beautiful, often disturbing and always thought-provoking, Darling explores themes of illness, hope, family, and the acceptance of mortality in a body of work that reminds us why we read poetry in the first place. Read more about Indelible, Miraculous, a collected edition of her poems, on the Arc website.

Come to Me

October 26, 2015April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I was bringing you a little cheese sandwich. It was two in the morning, everybody sleepy, shops closed but in the I Love You bar they gave me a little cheese sandwich.

I was in a taxi bringing you a little cheese sandwich ’cause you were lying there sad, perhaps even ill, and there was nothing good to eat in the house. Was real expensive, around one lat, but that’s OK.

So I was in the taxi with my little iluvu, all squished, practically cold. But for some reason I didn’t make it home. Somehow I ended up where all were merry and witty, and starving. So I drank, I sang, but I saved my little sandwich.

Must have been the third day when I could finally treat you to it, you were so angry, you ate the sandwich hardly looking at it. Had I had more courage, I would have said: but you know I love you, you know I admire you. Don’t make me say it again.

by Kārlis Vērdinš, translated by Ieva Lešinka

Tomorrow (Tuesday 27 October) at 7pm in the John Henry Brookes Building at Oxford Brookes, the prizegiving for the Poetry Centre’s Wellbeing Poetry Competition will take place. All are welcome. The event will also feature a reading from Dan Holloway, celebrated local poet, novelist, and publisher. You can read the winning poems now on the Centre’s website.

Notes from Arc Publications:

Kārlis Vērdiņš has published five books of poetry, which have been received with great critical acclaim and garnered top literary awards. He is a renowned poet, translator, and critic, living and working in Riga. Vērdiņš has an MA in Cultural Theory and a PhD in Philology. In addition to his innovative poetry, he has published many essays on literature as well as translations of European and American poets (including T.S. Eliot, Konstantin Biebl, Georg Trakl, Joseph Brodsky, Walt Whitman), and has also written libretti and song lyrics.

The poems in Come to Me show us what’s most noble in human relationships, alongside the basest fears and anxieties. Irony and sarcasm somehow never seem to obscure the warmth of Kārlis’s voice and his attention to intimate details. This book represents Kārlis at the peak of his poetic power: it is gripping, vivid and not a little romantic. Read more about the book on the Arc website.

Translator Ieva Lešinska-Gaber (Ieva Lešinska) studied English at the University of Riga. From 1978 to 1987 she lived and worked in the USA, studying at Ohio State University and the University of Colorado. She now lives in Riga, working as chief translator at the Bank of Latvia, and as a freelance journalist and translator. She has translated the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot and various American Beat Generation poets into Latvian, and has published numerous English translations of poems and prose by Latvian authors in periodicals and anthologies in the UK and the US.

Esther Alone

October 19, 2015April 4, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

I remember my birth as a dream,
Voices beyond the give and wrench
Of my mother’s bone-tunnel,
Pulled, pulled into the world,

The reddening, vein-thin last look,
Drench of fluid and air the length
Of my body as it fell feet first
To hang by the umbilical.

When I was two I found the company
Of cupboards, made friends
With dust in corners, a hidey hole
Between two rooms

Where I learned to sing
In the first language: mammal clicks
And growls, mouth pictures,
Before there was speaking.

On my fifth birthday I made a peg doll,
Crayon eyes and nipples, pink tissue skirt,
Married her to another peg,
Jammed their legs until they split.

I’d seen my father to my mother do it
And after, her thigh’s black marble.
By forty she was papering folds
Of her face where the powder gathered.

When I was seven I changed: thing
To girl back to thing; then a doubling,
One skin inside another.
At fourteen, my baby girl

By my father still-born in the woods,
Her eyes one long stitch in linen,
White as milk, white as the cut
That opened then sealed.

I grew into stone that could stand
The rain, the cold, the driven wind,
That would be an age in the weathering,
Speck of me a fossil eye watching

In the heart for the time to waken.
The train made the first crack, but deep,
Inaudible, then a fissure from that kiss
It’s taken three months to notice.

I grew out from there with every touch,
Eyelash reaching into leg then pubis,
The spine’s knuckling a whip
All the way to the pads of my fingers.

Now there is Iain I bend him to me.
We are tightening, we are softening,
Our bodies muscle of the other
Until we are more alike than different.

I stand in the wardrobe mirror,
My silvered scar, my silvered belly.
I look for where he has entered me,
And a slit opens an eye in my rib.

by Sarah Corbett

This is the second poem drawn from the new collections of Eleanor Rees and Sarah Corbett and published by Pavilion Poetry. We featured Eleanor Rees’s poem ‘The Cruel Mother’ last week, and you can read it on the Centre’s website. Both Sarah and Eleanor will be visiting Oxford this Friday 23 October – a super opportunity to hear two of the most exciting voices in contemporary poetry. The reading will take place at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Jericho from 7.30pm, and all are very welcome! You can get more details on our Facebook events page or by e-mailing us.

Sarah Corbett has published three collections of poetry with Seren Books: The Red Wardrobe (1998), The Witch Bag (2002) and Other Beasts (2008). She received an Eric Gregory award in 1997 and her work has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize, as well as being widely anthologised and translated. Her new book, And She Was: A Verse-Novel, was published in April by Pavilion Poetry. Sarah has a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing from Manchester University and teaches on Lancaster University’s Distance Learning MA in Creative Writing. She regularly collaborates with other artists, writers and filmmakers, and runs the monthly poetry reading series in Hebden Bridge, poetrynites@thebookcase. You can read more about And She Was on the LUP website, and more about Sarah’s work on her own site.

Pavilion Poetry is a new contemporary poetry series from Liverpool University Press, edited by Deryn Rees-Jones, which seeks to publish the very best in contemporary poetry. Always international in its reach, Pavilion Poetry is poetry that takes a risk. Whether by new or established and award-winning writers, this is poetry sure to challenge and delight. Launched in 2015, Pavilion’s first three books are by three exciting voices: Sarah Corbett, Eleanor Rees, and Mona Arshi. Pavilion has already enjoyed considerable success, with Mona Arshi’s book, Small Hands, winning the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection at this year’s Forward Prizes. You can read more about the series on the Liverpool University Press website.